Strolling With Ghosts...

Go to practically any city of  significant size and often you will see brochures or advertisements promoting "Ghost tours" or "Ghost walks" or something to similar effect,  These companies decide that they will let you pay them ten or twelve bucks to walk you around the city to spooky-looking locations and then tell you a story about what happened there.  Some may think they are tourist traps, but there are also people who love them and seek them out whenever they can (this humble writer is one of those people...I love a good ghost story).

Now, nine times out of ten, one will not see a ghost on these tours, but the tour guides always prep their tours by telling the tourists they might see something.  The guides will usually reference things that happened on all those other tours (you know, the ones you never seem to be on when cool stuff happens...)

Just last week the humble writer of this blog and his wife were on vacation and traveled around the east coast for a bit.  We spent a big chunk of our time between North and South Carolina coastal areas, and that's how we found ourselves in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Ah, Wilmington.   Wilmington is the home of a tour I had never seen before but apparently is pretty famous.  Yes, the Wilmington Haunted Pub Crawl  (just an aside, if you ever find yourself in Wilmington, I would recommend this tour.  It's a lot of fun if you get the right tour guide, which I feel we did.  This guy was hilarious.)

The breakdown of the tour is this:  you start in one particular pub (and there are a lot of pubs in Wilmington, let me tell you) and have a drink and hear a ghost story.  After your drink you travel en masse to the next pub, where you repeat the actions of the first pub.  Wilmington has a lot of dark history, and the stories were very neat to hear.

It was a drizzling Wilmington night when we went out on our pub crawl.  We started at a place called Orton's, which holds the distinction for being the oldest continuously operating pool hall in America.  After a quick pint, we heard the story of Willie Stephens, a ladies man and all about rascal whose body was found in the wreckage of the building after it burned down in the late 1800's.

The Orton Hotel as it originally appeared before it burned down.

Now all that is left of the Orton is the original basement (where the pool hall is).  Willie haunts the pool hall and if he likes you, he will help your billiards game by moving the balls into the pockets for you, but if he doesn't like you, then you will play the worst game of pool, ever.  The world's record for consecutive pool shots was set in the Orton pool hall (they have a sign and everything attesting to this) and the man who made the records even confessed that some of his shots should never have gone in (but they did!)  The record is 365 shots in a row.

This sign hangs above the pool table where the record was set

We ambled out of Orton's and to the next pub...

The Black Sheep...built beneath an old Masonic Temple.

The Black Sheep tavern shares history with the Orton.  You see, they all used to be part of one huge connected building, but they were divided up into separate parts.  One thing that they have in common is the basement (which was later divided also) but the Black Sheep was built below a Masonic Temple (which seemed to have a shady history).  Another pint, another story, and we were off to...

The Liquid Room!

The Liquid Room...home of the world's crankiest elevator.

The Liquid Room has seen a lot of owners.  Each one sold the bar to the next owner after a bad experience.   The Liquid Room (on Market Street) was the location of the old slave market back in pre-Civil War days.  When the Nat Turner slave uprising happened, the citizens of Wilmington were afraid of a similar slave uprising in Wilmington, so they found six freedmen, charged them with false charges and had them all hanged on Gallows Hill (just up the street).  They put their heads on sticks and displayed them here in front of the slave market so the slaves up for auction would see the heads and take it as a lesson not to try anything themselves.  So, flash forward through the years and the Liquid Room becomes a hotbed of paranormal activity.  Claims of seeing people on stairs (who weren't there) shelves falling on their own accord, and....the elevator that has a mind of its own.

The elevator...to Hell!  Just kidding.   But these are the doors to the elevator that tries to kill people!

The elevator, despite being one of the old ones that you have to slide a little gate in front of to make the circuit connection to operate, moves on its own without having that gate shut.  Many elevator repairmen have checked it out and said it's impossible, but there it is.  One of the waitresses stepped into it and fell down into the shaft and narrowly missed impaling herself on the spikes at the bottom of the shaft.

Another pint, and off to The Blue Post....

Hungry?  Stop in for a bite!

The Blue Post is one of the older pubs in Wilmington and got its name because it used to be a brothel and a bar.  When the sailors got off their boats in the harbor and ask where they could get some refreshment and some "entertainment,"  Gallus Meg, the owner of the bar, had a post outside the front painted blue, so the sailors were told to "look for the blue post."

Speaking of Gallus Meg, she was a huge woman (about 6 foot 3) and 300 pounds of rock solid muscle.  If any of her customers mistreated or disrespected her ladies, she would take them out the back of the bar, put them in a stranglehold while beating the crap out of them, then she would bend down and bite the customer's ear off.  She then would walk back into the bar with the ear still between her teeth and spit it into a large pickling jar she kept on the counter.

(Just on a side note, if a sailor came into the bar and was hungry, Gallus Meg would offer that poor sailor a snack from the pickling jar.  It was pretty common to see a poor, starving sailor chewing away on a meaty treat from the pickling jar.  The other patrons got a big kick out of watching it.)

Anyway, Gallus Meg's luck ran out and she was found stabbed to death outside the back door of her pub.

Paradise Alley.  The back door where Gallus Meg's body was found

So the ghost of Gallus Meg apparently haunts The Blue Post and is only seen by men.  The story goes if a man accidentally wanders into the ladies' room, he will see a large woman behind him in the mirror who is looking like she is about to strangle him.

So to sum up thoughts about a haunted pub crawl.  It was a lot of fun.  Was it paranormal?  No.  But if you're interested in good ghost stories, it's worth checking out.

Although this wasn't an official Paranormal Investigation Society of Tennessee outing as a whole, sometimes it's good to report on supernatural things as we come to them.  Now, you (as a reader) may have noticed some of the stories are slight on details at various pubs, but to retell the whole story would be to spoil it for yourself if you ever decide to go (and they travel to different pubs on different nights, so it's possible that if you went twice, you wouldn't go to the same pubs as the night before).

So, Ghost Tours are worth the money (in my opinion) but one has to wonder (as one goes to different cities on their tours) that the stories start to seem to sound similar.  Is it a matter of tour companies repackaging common urban legends to fit their locales?  Possibly, but the stories are still cool to hear.

Scooby Doo Never Caught a Ghost Either...

How do chains stay on a ghost?

Faithful readers of this blog (all two of you) know that in  previous posts there has been a lot of discussion (complaining, on my part) about the lack of activity that our last few investigations has turned up.  While this fact may be disheartening to a professional ghost hunter, we, as group, never make the claim that we are professional (that is, we do not have a television reality show).

So, that fact that there has been enough paranormal activity in the world to fill countless volumes of books, fill up no fewer than five different "haunted" type television shows at any given time, and be the subject of endless legends, tales, word-of-mouth stories, etc., would lead one to believe that random spirits just flitter around in the air waiting to be documented.  Well... not exactly.

The collected psychology of our "humanness" (for lack of a better word) makes us believe in a world past our physical realities (dogs, I don't think, have this problem).  So, when everyone (by everyone, I mean people) "buys in" to the belief of a world out there that Shakespeare referred to as "The Undiscovered Country" it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that we as people create.  In that world, spirits would, indeed, exist.  But are they real, or part of our collective subconscious?  A lot of people smarter than I have tackled this topic both from a theological and a secular perspective, so I won't even try to rehash those arguments (that's what Google is for).

So, when thinking about the last house we investigated, was it a Gateway to the Underworld?  (uh, no...)  Did bad things happen in that house? (maybe, but you could say that about almost all houses)  Was there evidence of a black, shadowy figure moving across the bedroom? (one person's black, shadowy figure is another person's trick of the light)  So what was it?  The history of the house had kids playing with Ouija boards.  Did that trigger paranormal activity?  (we should speak with Hasbro about this...)

In the end, it's a matter of perspective.  If a person truly believes something is haunted, then he or she is going to do everything they can to convince others (mostly because that person doesn't want others thinking he or she is crazy).  A neutral, third party comes in to investigate.  This party has no vested interest in the location, no personal ties, so this party can be objective.  Does the owner of the property project his or her belief onto the neutral party?  I believe so, in that we are always influenced by emotions and moods of people around us.  It's what makes us human.  The owner of the property is insistent that things are happening, and, like it or not, the investigative party is swayed by the emotions of the owner.  We all buy into the stories (whether true or not).

When a person looks a cloud and sees a horse shape, he will point to his buddy and say "look at that cloud, it's a horse."  His buddy will look up and say, "No, it's not a horse, it looks like a Volkswagen."  The first person will then say, "No, see, there's the legs, and there's the tail and there's the head.  I don't see why you don't see what I see."  His buddy will stare at the sky and finally say, "Yes, I suppose that kinda looks like a tail, and that kinda looks like a head."  The first person will then fill vindicated that he has convinced his buddy to see what he saw (even if his buddy secretly thinks that the cloud still looks like a Volkswagen).  Perspective.  People see or hear what they want and then try to convince others they are right.

The point is this.  Scooby-Doo never caught a real ghost (and just for clarification purposes, we're talking classic Scooby-Doo, not that crap they put on with Scrappy-Doo in the later years).  The idea is that Scooby-Doo and his gang always thought they were chasing a real ghost, no matter how many times they discovered it was a projected image or someone in disguise.  They believed it up to the end (when the old man's mask always came off.)  Their perspective was that they believed it was real, and they kept going on new investigations despite the fact that they never caught a real ghost.

So... I guess that's us.  Pushing onward even though the masks always come off in the end.

"I have heard (but not believ'd) the spirits of the dead / May walk again..."

Of course the title quote is from William Shakespeare (specifically from The Winter's Tale Act 3, Scene 3) and it is telling that Shakespeare wrote so much about ghosts and spirits.  Indeed, the idea of the spirit world is as old as time itself, and so why should the belief be any less in people now than then?

Science is partly to blame.  We now have logical, precise explanations for almost everything.  What was once called "psychic photography" is now a smudge on the lens of a camera or a moth caught in a flash of light.  So in the face of all the scientific advances and explanations, why is the "business" of ghost hunting so popular?

I said "business" because there are hundreds of attractions that draw people in by claiming to be "haunted."  The people who go to these sites are going because they like a good, scary story  (the idea of the "haunted attraction" was blogged about previously:  see "Selling You a Bill of Ghouls" so I will not rehash that argument here).

As a group, we have been to many "haunted" locations.  We've been to the Waverly Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, KY, we've been to Octagon Hall, we've been to the Old South Pittsburg Hospital, we've been to the Thomas House Hotel.  What do these places have in common?

They have built a business about advertising themselves as "haunted."

What have we found there?  Well, besides some good E.V.P.'s at Waverly Hills, and filmed footage of a ball rolling by itself across the floor at the Thomas House, not much.

Where have we gotten the most activity?  Out of the way places and private homes.  The places that do not oversell themselves as "haunted"  (the chilling results we got at the house known as Shackleford Corner still resonate with us today).

This blog post serves as a prelude to our investigation later tonight.  We always hope that this will be "the one" where we find something.  The point is: if a place is actually advertising itself as "haunted" feel free to go to it and enjoy it for the stories and the history, just don't go in expecting Hollywood type scares.

After all, there's no business like ghost business...